It’ll never happen anyway. Nobody with control has any interest in leveling the field for everyone. Uncontrolled free agency through the portal means that the chosen teams (the ones with money) have the opportunity to retool every year and give themselves a shot at a title. Screw everyone else.
MWC now has a guaranteed path into the College Football Playoffs...
- Thread starter M-I-Coug
- Start date
Agree. The blue blood schools are taking all the $$ in a cash grab and everyone else is grasping for scraps to try and hold on as long as they can.
The have nots are prob better off leaving and refusing to play those teams at all, in any sport, ever. Then denying transfers from those schools so their portal athletes are forced to go NAIA.
If WSU and OSU decided to send invites to schools they aligned with and stopped the insanity of chasing something that doesn’t want them, Im fine with it. Im aware of the financial implications. If that means WSU has to actually hire smart businessmen and salesmen rather than promote lifelong admins that have 0 experience in anything… that is prob a food thing.
As long as we’re listing things that will never happen….I’d like to see reasonable and rational people in the WSU president’s house (get rid of the dumbass Pullman chancellor position), in the governor’s mansion, and the White House. I’d like to see Gen Z & alpha put down the smartphones and learn some life skills and coping strategies. I’d like to see tickets to games reflect the value on the field, and Ticketmaster fees to go away. And, I’d like to see a rotating cast of coeds serving a rotating buffet (of actual food) and rotating taps of beer within a short walking distance of my reasonably priced and comfortable seats. But they should do it quietly, and stay off my lawn.
We, OSU or anyone else in that situation would certainly lose a big chunk of the roster. That is bad. But the reality is that we would then have a line of quality transfers waiting to come to us. And that is good. Sure, the lack of continuity would hurt, but we'd be in a position to do a good bit of reloading.
I prefer 70 for the same reasons as Biggs. Depending upon whether you made changes to the redshirt rules (or not), I might even think 75 made sense.
The #5 seed is going to be playing to win the NC, while the G5 team will be viewing the round one match up as their Superbowl. As a result, we will see more upsets than expected. This dynamic adds the element of chaos into the mix. It's going to be interesting how this all plays out.
A smaller roster doesn't work to our advantage. We are going to be taking flawed pieces, but this can be somewhat offset by getting more draws at the deck. If Dickert is going to maintain his focus on developing HS talent, we need to be able to supplement the roster from the portal.
I see us as a very attractive portal destination. If we are grabbing 25 HS players each year and 20-30 from the portal, we should be able to field a strong team. Deep bench guys across the country at going to get pushed out the door, which provides more opportunity for misused talent to find a home here. I'd run a similar offense/defense to some larger schools so their is familiarity for with the system as we get cast offs.
The trick going forward is the ability to cycle through as many players as possible in an attempt to get the best 60 or so each year. Guys not competing for the two deep in year two need to be pushed out the door and replaced with fresh blood.
If 85 is creating a group of teams that are a level above the majority, the way to create more competitiveness is by limiting access to accumulate talent. There is a balance between enough guys to run practice and teams hoarding all the 4-5 star talent. There are teams running on 80 scholarships all the time. 70-75 is fair imo.
If schools have the ability to pay kids AND pluck them out of free agency AND recruit them off other team’s rosters… there is no reason to also add more roster spots.
The G5 teams that get in are likely to be senior laden teams that have been together a while. Going up against teams that are full of portal guys and 5* freshmen and Sophs getting significant PT I tend to agree. There’s gonna be some upsets.
5/12 upsets in the CFP tournament will be roughly as common as 14/3 upsets in the NCAA tournament. The 5 seed will win 85-90%. And there will be no Cinderellas. A 12 seed winning a second round game will be the equivalent of a 16/1 upset. In a risk calculation, it’ll go down as “so improbable it can be reasonably assumed it will not occur.”
In my lifetime, only our 1997 (maybe 1983 by seasons end) team was capable of going toe-to-toe with the top-4 teams, so getting into the playoff and stealing a round 1 game would be a massive accomplishment for our program.
The 2002 team was up there. Would have put up much more of a fight against Oklahoma in the rose bowl if Price hadn’t already sent his playbook to Tuscaloosa. Wasn’t that also the team that was in a dogfight at Ohio state early in the season?
I didn't think as much of the 2002 team. Thought they were maybe the 10th best team, which is where we finished. We lost the 3 of the 4 biggest games on our schedule.
The OSU game wasn’t that close, you might be thinking about the ND game which we should have won. That 2002 team was damn good though. All of those teams, 01-03 were a couple plays away from being top 5. And far inferior UW teams also beat us every one of those years.
Notre dame was 2003 with Kegel. The Ohio state game could have stayed in reach if we could have figured out an answer for Maurice Clarett. Unfortunately didn’t have the horses at LB for that matchup.
Hmmm… so, #5 is a BlueBlood committee favorite “everyone” is talking about with a chance to appear in the NC game.
The Committee chooses #12 as the opponent to best suit the long term interests of the Committee by using a secret process and criteria.
What keeps the Committee from choosing a bad matchup for #5 to push their Hype train?
Kind of late to the party but here is the list of G5 teams invited to the NY6 games:
2014: BSU (MWC)
2015: Houston
2016: Western Michigan
2017: UCF
2018: UCF
2019: Memphis
2020: Cincinnati
2021: Cincinnati
2022: Tulane
2023: Liberty
The Mountain West has not been to an NY6 game in half a generation. Why should we assume that they have a guaranteed path to anything? Several of those teams have been pulled into Power 5 leagues now, but it's pretty arrogant for the MWC to assume that their champion gets anything special at the end of the season.
2014: BSU (MWC)
2015: Houston
2016: Western Michigan
2017: UCF
2018: UCF
2019: Memphis
2020: Cincinnati
2021: Cincinnati
2022: Tulane
2023: Liberty
The Mountain West has not been to an NY6 game in half a generation. Why should we assume that they have a guaranteed path to anything? Several of those teams have been pulled into Power 5 leagues now, but it's pretty arrogant for the MWC to assume that their champion gets anything special at the end of the season.
This is why WSU and OSU, if their attempts to join an existing P4 conference fail, need to do everything they can to create the strongest G5 super conference in the Nation. Form an East/West pod of teams and have a championship game with an NCAA playoff bid on the line.
I would much prefer that we form a "Pac-West / Atlantic-East" league of the 24 best teams from the MWC, ACC castaways, and AAC including all 3 military academies, as opposed to just absorbing all of the MWC programs.
Not that I think the MWC champ will be in there every year -- someone else may have claimed that, but not me -- but most of those were unusually good G of 5 programs/teams and almost none of those teams you list remain in the G of 5. MAC, CUSA, and Sun Belt teams won't be real threats 90% of the time.
It primarily will boil down to whether one of the few remaining decent AAC teams is very good in any particular year, and at this point, it has few realistic candidates. I'm being a little flippant here, but it pretty much will just be Memphis if it is "up" and one of those Florida schools if it has an unusual situation like rehabbing a fired SEC coach with big name value (like when Kiffin was at Florida Atlantic).
The one bit of "good" news for the MWC in terms of the relative undesirability of its programs in P4 conferences is that it has stayed intact, and even will be improved if the reverse merger happens (not that I want that). It or, should a rebuilt Pac-12 get stuck with the G of 5 label (not off the table), then that conference probably will be the strongest G of 5 conference top to bottom most years. I could see its teams beating up on each other fairly often, though, and screwing its top program or two out of a playoff bid in many years, similar to what we used to see in the former Pac-12.
Last edited:
